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Wednesday, 21 October 2015

Meetings with Remarkable Trees by Thomas Pakenham

This is a beautiful book, made up of portraits in prose and photos of 6o individual trees (or groups of trees) from around the UK, selected by the author for their strong personalities. Most of these trees are very old and very large, all of them have interesting histories.

The trees include:

Kett's Oak at Wymondham, Norfolk under which rebel peasants, under the leadership of Robert Kett, gathered in 1549 to demand an end to the enclosure of common land.

The gingko at Kew Gardens. This individual tree dates to 1762 but gingkos have been around for 60 million years.

A yew tree in Crowhurst, Surrey which has a door buit into it and which early in the 19th Century was fitted out as a room with table and chairs!

And many other wonderful individuals, showing just how fascinating trees can be!

This book was apparently also adapted into a radio and television series.

Meetings with Remarkable Trees by Thomas Pakenham, published by Cassell Paparbacks

7 comments:

This sounds like my kind of book as I have read several natural histories of species of trees. Donald Peattie has a series of books about trees in North America in which he not only tells about the tree from a scientific point-of-view, but also stories and natural histories of them. I have his book on Western trees. He did a second volume on Central and Eastern trees, but didn't finish his book on Southern trees before his death.